Have you ever dealt with business support from Google? If you can get support at all, it's basically bots and auto replies. Even the worst state in the US has better support than Google or any other big software company out there.
Would love to hear if someone actually has had a positive support experience with Google.
My company has faced a bug in their location dashboard for over a year. We support local businesses and often get asked to update their Google business details. We're unable to delegate location dashboard access inside our Apps domain. My partner can send the invite to any gmail account, but can't send access to me inside the company. I can't even access my own company's panel through my paid Apps account.
We've had calls, emails, sent tweets. Repeatedly asked for supervisors or for the issue to be forwarded to an engineer. The typical response is to get blamed or deal with support confusion in India over what we're trying to achieve.
The end result of 'partner' support? They gave a 2 hour notice over a major rebrand to GSuite. The only way they could do it better is send us a postcard simply saying 'FUCK YOU!', and in smallprint 'but thanks for your money and information'. As said in other threads on this topic, Comcast offers better support. That's telling.
I won't use any Google product for anything serious because of the complete and utter lack of support. It is virtually impossible to get a human to look at something, even when the process outlined is human-based rather than automated.
1. About 4 years ago, I tried to move a business on Google Maps. It took 10 months and contacting AdWords support to get it done.
2. This year I've been trying to get an API quota increase for my employer. At 3+ months the request has still gone unanswered. Thankfully we don't depend on that for any revenue-generating function.
Yes, I have first hand experience with this. Dealing with Google "support" taught me a harsh reality that Google simply isn't interested in support in the way that Fortune 500 companies need and expect.
The best support (the only real support) I’ve ever gotten for Google products were
(a) partnersupport-de@youtube.com (support for youtube partners, monetized, back in the days, German),
(b) This very website. Start an angry thread, get it to the front page – or post a comment on a frontpage thread about a dev topic – and suddenly some Google dev ends up fixing it, and in the same moment, your comment on here disappears.
Support methods I have also tried:
(c) Buying Google Apps for Business (the 30 day free month), then calling their support, after the support call was successful, cancelling it again (doesn’t work, Google doesn’t answer Google Apps for Business calls, someone takes your call, you say hi, in the same second they hang up on you)
Support methods I have not tried yet, but plan to, in case the previous ones don’t work anymore:
(d) Just arriving in person at their nearest Google office, getting entrance somehow, and then directly providing my complaints to the next manager (at risk of getting sued for entering their office illegally)
I was very unlucky all the times I tried to get support from Google. I'm starting to think google is just an AI that doesn't have people working there.
If you have a business account with them you get a rep that you can actually speak to, just fyi, google has been improving business support vastly over the last few years. Everyone else though is relegated to those ms-support-esque forums.
Google has millions of users and provides zero support for a lot of its products. I've had products generating passive income with ~50000 users and has to answer no more than a couple of support emails a month that required no more than a simple answer.
I agree with the support issue,a lot of google products even paid ones barely have any support(unless you're a big corp customer). If i cant get in touch with the team and ask questions,i'm not going to buy the saas.
Google has great customer support... if you spend thousands of dollars in ad buys with them. We had weekly conference calls with google back when our ad buy was in the 40k+ a month range. They won't give you the time of day unless you spend a lot of money with them though, which means 95% of their customers get little or no support at all.
I couldn't agree more. Much smaller companies with much smaller capital have options to contact for support issues in a person to person basis. With Google Adwords, it is virtually non-existant. Considering the fact that you have to either really screw up or get a lot of attention to yourself for Google to get to you, without that you are out of luck.
Automated response is not a solution to all problems.
Yeah, Google tends to rely on machines too much for customer support for paid services. I understand the rationale, but it's just not good enough compared to real people handling customer support... yet
I find that most support you receive these days (whether its from the public or the private sector) feels like it is coming from a bot. Even if it is another human on the other end. Google in particular feels like they create inflexible non-robust policies that do not have an escape valve for when things go wrong on Google's side. If I had more options I wouldn't put up with it.
Could you offer arguments or anecdotes about why you think Google is terrible at support? Snarky, four-character comments like yours do not add much value to the discussion.
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